Japanese-American Alliance Is Older, Greater Than WW II
After a more than a 75-year posture of defensive pacifism, Japan is rapidly shedding its post-World War II disposition. Increased deployments of U.S. Marines, additional troop movements, and strengthened naval ties with the United States of America are all part of this endeavor. The rise of Chinese militarism and the belligerent tone adopted by the Xi Jinping dictatorship have forced Japan into the first major rethinking of its foreign policy in more than seven decades. In the past decade, U.S.-Japan relations have resulted in a more militarily serious Japan willing to act on its role as a major regional power. This is a welcome development that Americans would be right to cheer on. How we reached this point, however, has been a winding road.
Two generations removed, World War II still looms large in the American psyche. The memory of the attack on Pearl Harbor, three and a half years of brutal warfare in the Pacific, and mankind’s (to date) sole use of nuclear weapons remain influential in how Americans and Japanese understand their relationship with each other.
As late as the 1980s, a significant number of Americans saw Japanese economic power as a threat. Japan’s commercial and industrial growth in the 1970s and 1980s made its economy the second largest in the world. Yet while its growing financial strength and stability of economic strength made it a regional power, the country’s pacifist constitution meant that its ability to exercise that influence remained limited.
The aptly named Japanese Self-Defense Forces were forbidden from exercising any offensive military capabilities. Even as Japan remained militarily weak, its economy was catching up with the United States. Japanese goods — particularly automobiles — began to overshadow American-built products. For its own part, Japan used its growing influence to broaden its sociocultural footprint in the United States. This particularly helped Japanese technology companies. Japan attained eye-catching influence throughout American telemedia in the 1980s. Coming-of-age stories like “The Karate Kid,” myriad anime programs, and Asian-themed highbrow films like “Blade Runner” all entered the American social lexicon. Japan wasn’t trying to take over the U.S., but it certainly helped trade negotiations when American kids wanted Nintendo or Sega game system for Christmas.
'Yellow peril' rose as concern
Even basic American action movies didn’t escape Japan’s rising influence. The hit 1988 film “Die Hard” takes place at Nakatomi Plaza, the headquarters of the giant eponymous Japanese tech company. Michael Crichton, the late author of “Jurassic Park” and the creator of “ER,” wrote a novel, “Rising Sun,” about nefarious Japanese corporate influence infiltrating decaying American society. Americans in the 1970s and 1980s questioned why their government used the might of the American military to protect a country that appeared so effective at stifling American industry and cultural influence. A new Yellow Peril — a term used in the early 20th century to describe American fears of Asian influence and power — was rising. Much of the American fear that it was losing its preeminence to Japan was sensationalized. The United States’ higher birth rate meant that Japan could never keep pace demographically, and Japan needed American dollars, and a strong American economy was necessary to keep the Japanese economy strong.
Rancor and rivalry, however, represent only a small part of the longue duree of the relationship between Japan and America. In 1854, the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and the U.S. Navy in Tokyo Bay heralded the beginning of the critical alliance between the two Pacific powers. With the imposing military might of the United States behind him, Perry negotiated the Treaty of Kanagawa with the Japanese government, opening certain Japanese ports to American trade and eventually the rest of the Western World.
Dutch traders based in modern Indonesia had carved out a sliver of trade with Japan for more than 200 years. The Shoguns allowed Dutch ships to port irregularly, and the traders could not stay resident in Japan. They left almost as soon as they arrived. Through their display of superior military might, the American navy made it clear that they would not be treated with the same hauteur as the Japanese treated the Dutch. The Americans were in Japan to stay. Soon after, British, Chinese, French, Portuguese, and Russian vessels all began regular or semi-regular trade with Japan.
America key to modernizing Japan
Still, it was the Americans who were the driving force behind modernizing Japan, and it was the Americans who insisted on being treated as equals by the Japanese. In 1858, the U.S. consul to Japan, Townsend Harris, negotiated a second treaty between the two nations, this time establishing more trade privileges and exempting U.S. citizens living in the ports from the jurisdiction of Japanese law. Americans who committed crimes on the Japanese home islands would instead be tried in special American courts. Emperor Komei disliked the concessions but his son and heir to the throne Meiji tolerated them in order to gain American economic, educational, and military expertise.
By that time, Japan’s emperors had not actually governed their realm for more than two centuries. The reclusive Japanese state was ruled by a series of shoguns — military dictators in all but name — who ostensibly governed Japan in the name of the emperors. The emperors had become more religious figures than political ones, demigods whose persons were too pure to deal in mere mortal matters like politics. This all changed in 1868. Young emperor Meiji, who inherited the title a year prior, was fascinated by the West, believing friendship with Western countries would strengthen Japan and solidify political unity. In less than a year, he overthrew the shogunate and restored imperial rule with the support of important daimyō (lords) and samurai.
Meiji was so interested in the West’s technology, military, and commercial strength that in 1871 he sent a group of emissaries to the United States and Western Europe to learn more. The Iwakura Embassy met with President Ulysses S. Grant and strengthened treaty ties between the United States and Japan observing American industry and culture. Notably, they were especially interested in American education, which the Japanese government believed was the best in the world. Observations made in various U.S. schools formed the foundation for Japanese education policy through Meiji’s reign.
Japan also received several American advisors throughout the 1870s. To name just a few: William Elliott Griffiths, a Dutch Reformed minister, came to Japan to tutor the children of a Japanese nobleman and ended up serving on the faculty of what became the University of Tokyo; William Smith Clark, a professor at the predecessor to the University of Massachusetts, helped reform Japanese agriculture; Henry W. Denison entered the service of the Japanese foreign ministry in 1880 and remained until his death in 1914; James R. Wassan, a Union army veteran of the Civil War, moved to Japan in 1872, garnered a reputation as a valuable aid to Japanese generals, and eventually served as the chief of staff to Saigō Jūdō, Japan’s naval minister in the 1880s.
Japan emerges as major military power
By the time Meiji died in 1912, Japan had become a modern state with a military to rival the great powers of Europe. In May 1905, the Imperial Japanese Navy obliterated a Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima Strait, ending the Russo-Japanese War. Theodore Roosevelt arbitrated the peace talks between Japan and Russia, successfully guided the conflict to a close, and one year later, won the Nobel Peace Prize for the accomplishment. After signing the Treaty of Portsmouth, Japan emerged as the major power in the western Pacific.
The military rivalry between Japan and the United States began after Portsmouth and lasted until it was decisively settled in Tokyo Bay four decades later. The defeated country that signed its surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri would be slowly rebuilt with the help of the victorious United States. That partnership has lasted 70 years and has strengthened as Communist China threatens and destabilizes the region.
Partnership between the United States and Japan is no longer a geopolitical luxury to give Nintendos to Americans or Starbucks to the Japanese. It’s a serious political necessity to maintain democracies in the region. The Chinese acquisition of Hong Kong in 1997 and the subsequent imposition of authoritarianism proves China isn’t likely to become a capitalist democracy through commerce and trade. The rise of autocracy in China has prompted Japan to throw off its pacifism and join forces with the United States to stop the communist threat. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also sanctioned Russia after that country invaded Ukraine. Kishida doesn’t view the United States as a rival but as a partner and “brother democracy” standing up for liberal democratic freedoms across the globe. Japan will double its military expenditures, citing “Serious concern about reports of militarization, coercion, and intimidation in the South China Sea,” an allusion to China’s regional bullying.
Increased military spending has also coincided with a cozier relationship with the United States. Japan has welcomed increased American military capabilities on its home islands. Formidable U.S. Marines are now able to use offensive weaponry from their base in Okinawa. A meeting between President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Kishida at the beginning of 2023 was presented by both governments as a watershed in the relationship between Japan and the United States. According to the White House, the meeting between the two heads of government was “about Japan essentially aligning with the United States, in many ways like a NATO ally.”
Yes, Japan and the United States have been friends much longer than they were enemies. But that friendship is now founded on a strong Japan, rather than a weak one, and Japan’s new military policies are an important indication that it is rising to the challenge of being the most valuable American ally in the Pacific.
Japan, long an economic partner of the United States, is now becoming something more: a true military ally as well. Japan and the United States are closer than ever. A former conquered foe is now a brother in arms against contemporary forces of authoritarianism.
